Repairing last year’s hail damage

LETHBRIDGE – Nearly a year after parts of southern Alberta were ravaged by hail storms the damage is still evident with many homes and buildings waiting to be repaired.

A hail storm in June and another one in July caused significant damage in Lethbridge and parts of southern Alberta. In one part of the city, almost every home in a 200 unit manufactured home park was damaged by hail.

“Hail typically will do roofing damage,” said Peter Locke, general manager of WaterProofing Roofing, “and siding damage as well, depending on the size of the hail.

Hail hammered the roof of Frank Turnbull’s home. It also punched holes in the siding on its walls.

“It really made a big racket,” Turnbull said. “The windows I thought were coming in. It was very bad.”

Fortunately, he had insurance to cover the damages.

“The first estimate we got was 18 thousand dollars,” he said. “Right afterwards I contacted another contractor and it was 28 thousand. Now what it’s going to turn out to be has not yet been approved, and this is just about a year later.

Locke said the number of roofing companies has doubled in the past six months in an attempt to fix the damaged houses. Even so, he expects it will be a year before they are all done. There may also be more damage this year.

“We’re concerned,” said Locke. “We don’t have the capacity to handle any more claims at this point. The storms typically come in July and August, the hottest months, and occasionally in June.”

Waterproofing Roofing and other companies have hired extra crews to help repair the backlog of damaged homes.

“We think we’ve roughly done about a third to half of the work,” he said and added some people have not filed for damage yet.

“There are a lot of houses that have not been scoped yet, or estimated, or people who had maybe less severe damage or didn’t notice it but then noticed that everybody else’s roof is being done or everybody else’s siding, maybe I should call my insurance company too.”

The roofing, siding and repair companies are busy, repairing as many homes as they can before winter.